New York Public Library

Click here for more information. Discover the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s. From communal living and forays into expanded consciousness, to tensions around race, politics, sexuality and the environment, this exhibition explores the breadth and significance of this period. This event is part ...

By Jil Picariello, Theater Editor, April 22, 2018
Wendy’s Shabbat, a short film which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last night, is not about Sabbath dinner at the home of a Jewish matron named Wendy. Wendy’s Shabbat, directed by Rachel Myers, is about a group of Jewish seniors ...

ZEALnyc, March 28, 2018
The proliferation of film festivals has grown substantially over the years, with many being created to promote niche viewing or a specialized focus. The Brooklyn Film Festival, now celebrating its twenty-first year, has just closed its submission process after having ...

By Mercedes Vizcaino, Contributing Writer, February 6, 2018
The who’s who of the French animation world graced the red carpet at the French Institute Alliance Française’s (FIAF) Florence Gould Hall this past weekend. FIAF hosted the first-ever French Animation Festival: Animation First in the ...

By Christopher Caggiano, Contributing Writer, August 14, 2018
Sometimes shows come to Broadway that automatically get the online theater wags sharpening their knives. Before a show has even played its first preview, the theaterati start taking bets on when it will close, and polishing off their “What ...

By Christopher Caggiano, Contributing Writer, August 13, 2018
Before the 1980s, Boston was a major out-of-town stop for plays and musicals before they went to Broadway. The economics of such tryouts have changed drastically, as has the standard model for developing new plays and musicals, and Boston’...

By A. E. Colas, Contributing Writer, August 13, 2018
The Hudson Valley has a special place in the heart of Art Break. So many of our favorite artists spent their summers in the region with friends and family, working on projects, and enjoying the beautiful landscape, just ...

By Doug Hall, Contributing Writer, August 10, 2018
This year’s Newport Jazz Festival highlighted an incredibly diverse selection of women performers and women ensemble groups. The festival’s founder George Wein, in his newsletter “Notes from the Wein Machine” (March, 2018), was very direct in his statement ...

By Megan Wrappe, Contributing Writer, August 9, 2018
Discovering how life works is what resonates the most in Lisa Langseth’s one-woman show Beloved, starring Ellinor DiLorenzo and directed by Kathy Curtiss. The play begins with the character Katarina rummaging around her grandmother’s cottage, putting things ...

By Diana Mott, Contributing Writer, August 6, 2018
Before We're Gone ended it's run at 13th Street Repertory Theatre on August 5 with hopes of moving uptown and, with caveats, it deserves another chance to be seen. It is a small play, made for a small stage in ...

By Brian Taylor, Contributing Writer, August 6, 2018
The Mostly Mozart Festival's recent presentation of the International Contemporary Ensemble at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College was a welcome respite from the summer's punishing mugginess. Entitled "Grand Pianola Music," after the John Adams piece ...

By A. E. Colas, Contributing Writer, August 6, 2018
Here at Art Break, we’ve often complained that people don’t realize how much art is available to see outside New York City. Case in point: the great state of Connecticut. Never been? Well, you’re missing ...

By Dan Ouellette, Senior Editor ZEALnyc, August 3, 2018
Last year marked the 60th birthday of composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein’s classic Broadway show West Side Story, famously made into a 10 Academy Award-winning movie version in 1961 starring among others the Puerto Rico-born actress Rita Moreno. This year ...

By Christopher Caggiano, Contributing Writer, August 3, 2018
After the disastrous 2011 Broadway revisal of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, it was looking like we might never see that show in New York City again. Peter Parnell’s ridiculous, gender-switching libretto, combined with Michael Mayer’...

By Mercedes Vizcaino, Contributing Writer, November 10, 2017
Independent film, Gold Star, grapples with the themes of caregiving, acceptance and self-discovery. The film, released commercially today by first–time director Victoria Negri, is abuzz within the film festival circuit. It’s been ...

By Christopher Caggiano, Contributing Writer, November 8, 2017
If you were to ask theater fans which musical they were most hoping to see turned into a film, it’s doubtful you would find anyone point to Hello Again, Michael John LaChiusa’s 1994 Off-Broadway succès d’estime. In fact, you’d ...

By Mercedes Vizcaino, Contributing Writer, July 14, 2017
Almost Sunrise, the documentary film from award-winning filmmaking team, Michael Collins (director) and Marty Syjuco (producer) challenges and explores the misconceptions war and the inevitable and consuming effects Post Traumatic Stress ...

By Mercedes Vizcaino, Contributing Writer, June 14, 2017
The Brooklyn Film Festival recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and this year’s film roster was brimming with edgy and thought-provoking subject matter. With over 122 features and shorts from 32 countries, the talented filmmakers ...

By Mercedes Vizcaino, Contributing Writer, May 17, 2017
Founded in 2001 by two undergraduate students (David Peck and Justin Slosky) from Brown University, the Ivy Film Festival has become one of the most well-known international platforms for students to showcase their films. The School of Visual ...

ZEALnyc, May 9, 2017
Ivy Film Festival brings its 2017 Official Selection of student films from around the world to New York with a screening at the School of Visual Arts’ (SVA) Beatrice Theatre on Friday, May 12 at 7:00 p.m., followed by a reception. This event will be ticketed, but free and ...

ZEALnyc, April 7, 2017
Milestone anniversaries are meant to be celebrated, especially in the arts, where financial stability and maintaining the status quo can often be tenuous at best. So as the Brooklyn Film Festival (BFF) announces its plans for its upcoming twentieth year in existence, we wish ...

ZEALnyc, January 6, 2017
The popularity of independent films has increased dramatically over the past decade, and the trend doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. There are approximately 3,000 active film festivals throughout the world, and there have been close to 10,000 festivals that ...

By Annika Andersson, Contributing Writer, December 28, 2016
Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer? is the thought-provoking documentary about Dr. William Hurwitz, who was convicted of over 50 counts of narcotics distribution for too generously prescribing painkillers to his patients, which ended up ...

By Annika Andersson, Contributing Writer, December 20, 2016
It’s now the holiday season, and what do we look forward to as much as getting presents and engaging in holiday cheer? Going to the movies! That’s right, Tinseltown strategically plans all their film’s release dates, ...

By Annika Andersson, Contributing Writer, November 14, 2016
More than 250 films are being shown in lower Manhattan as part of DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary festival. The festival only lasts one week (until November 17), but the journey of the films continues. These three documentaries ...

By Annika Andersson, Contributing Writer, November 7, 2016
As the temperatures drop, along with the leaves and daylight hours, the time has come to go indoors. America’s largest documentary festival DOC NYC kicks off with over 250 films and more than 300 filmmakers and special guests appearing in ...

ZEALnyc, November 1, 2016
The 2016 NYC Horror Film Festival will take place from November 10-13 at the newly-named Cinepolis Chelsea (formerly Bow Tie Cinemas), located at 260 West 23rd Street, NYC. There will be 15 different programs over the course of the four-day festival, comprising both ...

ZEALnyc, October 20, 2016
This Halloween season from October 21-27, 2016, a terrifying new horror film festival comes to New York City—FEARnyc. It will be New York’s biggest horror film festival, and will be presented at Cinema Village (22 East 12th Street), and will feature screenings of ...

By Annika Andersson, Contributing Writer, October 7, 2016
Director Ava DuVernay’s latest documentary is a time travel through African-American history from the Civil War up until today. The 13th amendment abolished involuntary servitude in the United States, except as a punishment for crime. ...

Thelma Adams, Film Editor, August 23, 2016
Edgar Ramirez. Robert DeNiro. To watch the mega-masculine actors spar in the boxing biopic Hands of Stone — the story of Panamanian fighter Roberto Duran and his aging American trainer Ray Arcel — is to revel in two nimble performers striking ...

Thelma Adams, Film Editor, August 11, 2016
A ghastly moment concludes Florence Foster Jenkins. The titular arts patron with the rancid voice — Jenkins booked herself into Carnegie Hall before her death from complications of syphilis in 1944– played with brio by Meryl Streep, says ...

Thelma Adams, Film Editor, May 6, 2016
Weiner raises the train-wreck documentary to new heights. Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s all-access view of the downward spiral of Anthony Weiner’s 2013 mayoral campaign couldn’t be more relevant or entertaining at this moment as the ...

Thelma Adams, Film Editor, March 2, 2016
Let us pause to praise Tina Fey, the Sally Field of her generation, or perhaps the Mary Tyler Moore. She is adorable and whip-smart and a bit insecure, which makes her all the more relatable. But, like George Clooney as he wandered the desert in search of a ...

Thelma Adams, Film Editor, February 5, 2015
There is a nearly interstitial blissful moment in the Coen Brothers’ chaotically joyous “Hail, Caesar!” when the singing cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) stands outside of a Hollywood mansion for a studio-arranged date. As ...

Jaylan Salah, Contributing Writer, November 25, 2015
Home is where the heart lies. Does this saying have any truth to it?
“You’re homesick, that’s all. Everybody gets it. But it passes. In some it passes more quickly than in others. There’s nothing harder than it. And the rule is to have ...

Thelma Adams, Film Editor, September 29, 2015
Carol is a sinfully rich romance in which most – but not all – the action occurs on the gorgeous faces (or refracts in the subtle glances) of leads Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. The notion that true love is a physical, emotional and spiritual bond ...

Thelma Adams, Film Editor, September 25, 2015
Since I am committed to raising the profile of female-driven narratives, here’s a shout-out for the peculiarly subdued, fantastically acted action film that is Daniel Barber’s Civil War drama The Keeping Room with a script by Julia ...

Thanks Don Winslow. (Said with the cadence of ‘Thanks Obama.’) You ruined the drug-war action drama Sicario for me.
Winslow’s fantastic, methodically researched novel The Cartel is an unsentimental education in six hundred pages. James Ellroy nailed it when he called the novel ...

Jeremy Moran, Contributing Writer, July 29, 2015
Ahh, summer; the season to spend as much time outside before the air freezes up and the leaves turn brown. You can head to the beach, bike out in the sun, or simply sit outside getting lost in a book and drinking a coke. What you may not know is that ...

Jeremy Moran, Contributing Writer, July 28, 2015
The Tribe is a challenging, difficult experience that will haunt you for days. Told entirely through Ukrainian Sign Language, the film contains no subtitles, no music, and no voice-over. In other words, it will not tell you how to think. If you want ...

Alicia Vikander has been on the verge of breaking out big (Oscar-nominated A Royal Affair, the summer’s sleeper hit Ex Machina, second fiddle to Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina) since I met her three years ago at the Hamptons International Film Festival as one of ten stars to watch. Now, ...

Tomorrowland, named after Disneyland’s future-themed neighborhood, is Spy Kids in space. Which turns out not be a bad thing although it may come as a surprise to those who have watched George Clooney do the endless P.R. rounds, hefting his epic charm as if it were Thor’s hammer.
On ...